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Biography

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James Thompson, also recorded as James Thomson, was an English Roman Catholic priest and martyr of the Elizabethan persecution. He was a native of Yorkshire in northern England; neither a precise birthplace within the county nor a year of birth is preserved in the surviving sources. He belonged to the generation of English Catholics formed after the Reformation, when the Mass, papal allegiance, and the training of Catholic clergy had been outlawed in England. Men who sought ordination therefore crossed to the Continent, above all to the English College at Reims, which served as the principal seminary for the English mission in the later sixteenth century.

Thompson arrived at Reims on 19 September 1580. After a comparatively short course of study he was ordained priest on 31 May 1581 in the cathedral of Soissons by the bishop of that see. On 10 August 1581 he was sent back to England. Seminary diaries and later recusant historians supply almost no detail of his pastoral work during the year that followed; only the fact of his return and the circumstances of his capture are securely attested.

On 11 August 1582 he was arrested in York, in the house of a Catholic named Blackburn (or Blackburne), and committed to York Castle. At the November assizes he acknowledged that he was a priest ordained abroad. Under the treason legislation then applied to missionary clergy, that admission was sufficient for a capital conviction. On 28 November 1582 he was hanged, drawn and quartered at the Knavesmire, the ordinary place of execution outside York. Contemporary notices describe his death as steadfast; the quartered remains were disposed of according to the usual practice of the time, and no burial place is recorded.

Pope Leo XIII beatified him on 29 December 1886 among a group of English and Welsh martyrs of the Reformation era. He has not been canonized. His individual liturgical commemoration falls on 28 November, the anniversary of his execution; he is also remembered collectively with other martyrs of England and Wales. Beyond the outline given in the Reims college records and the accounts of his trial and death, virtually nothing is known of his family, character, or specific ministry.

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